Robert King, the US envoy on human rights in North Korea, will visit South Korea and Japan later this month (..). North Korea on Wednesday rejected calls to grant access to a UN independent expert, but agreed to consider allowing international agencies such as the World Food Program into the country and signing up to international labor and human rights treaties.

Twenty years after singing the somber Ring Them Bells, he has attached them to a sleigh, painted them silver and given them a jolly jingle.(..)Dylan will donate his royalties in perpetuity to three charities that aid the hungry: Feeding America, the U.K.-based Crisis and the United Nations' World Food Programme.

A third of North Korea women and young children are malnourished and the country will run short of almost 1.8 million tonnes of food this year, according to a UN relief agency report seen Monday.
According to the latest UN assessment, the country will need close to this amount from imports or assistance "even to meet the most basic food needs of the 24 million North Korean population," the World Food Programme (WFP) office in the country said.

I had the rare opportunity in 2002 to take a road trip through North Korea. I had been invited into the country by Pyongyang along with several other foreign correspondents, and even though we rode in a modern bus, the journey itself was like going back in time. (..) Thanks to bad floods in 2007, food shortages last year were likely the worst experienced since the 1990s. The World Food Program (WFP) says it has launched a program to feed 6.2 million people in North Korea, or more than a quarter of the population. Yet in March, North Korea, without explanation, rejected all food aid from the United States, its largest official donor, and kicked five aid groups distributing the food out of the country.

North Korean families are feeling the pinch following Pyongyang's refusal of U.S. food aid earlier this year, with the United Nations saying it already sees a humanitarian crisis in the isolated Stalinist state. "We do believe there’s a humanitarian crisis right now, especially for some of the more remote rural regions of the northernmost part of North Korea," World Food Program (WFP) senior spokesman Paul Risely said. The WFP says it is currently able to operate at around only 15 percent of its capacity, feeding fewer than 1.5 million of the 6.2 million people already identified as in need of food aid this year.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) is scaling down its food assistance to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) due to a lack of funding, said the agency's spokesperson here on Thursday. "The number one reason of why we have to scale down our operations (in the DPRK) is a lack of funding," WFP spokesperson Bettina Luescher told a press conference here. "When we launched the operation in October, we were hoping we could feed 6 million people but the funds have simply not come in."

The UN Security Council has agreed to begin work immediately on a new resolution on North Korea after its nuclear test, its chairman said. (..) After the worst harvest for a decade, the World Food Programme says a quarter of the population of North Korea needs food aid.

(...) The North Korean Government has one of the worst human rights record in the world. Of the country's more than 23 million people, about nine million are in need of urgent food assistance, according to the World Food Programme.

Vietnam is willing to help North Korea produce food, Vietnam's foreign affairs ministry said Thursday as Pyongyang faces what the United Nations calls a severe food crisis. [...] Following successive poor harvests, the United Nation's World Food Programme expects up to 40% of North Korea's population - or an estimated 8.7 million people - will urgently need food aid in the coming months.